The first smiley was created by Dr. Scott Fahlman - then a computer science research professor at Carnegie-
Mellon University, now an IBM researcher - to prevent the frequent misunderstandings that occurred when one person's joke or sarcasm posted to a local electronic bulletin board was unwittingly taken seriously by others. Widely distributed over the primitive computer networks of the day, the smiley has spawned an entire vocabulary of smiles, retorts, and graphic elements constructed from a line of keyboard characters. Fahlman's
colleagues at CMU recently unearthed the original email and discussion from Sept. 19, 1982, which can be viewed along with other "smiley lore" via links at his website. See: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/ (Syllabus News, Resources, Trends for 24 Sept 02)